‘So you work for Mr Knightly now.’
‘Yes, sir. But if you’re going to ask me what this is about, I don’t know.’
‘Does Tom Waverly work for Mr Knightly?’
‘Not that I know of.’
Albert Flynn had a pretty good poker face.
Stone thought for a moment, told Flynn that he would talk to Knightly once he’d made a couple of phone calls, and walked outside into the cold, floodlit compound.
He talked to Bruce Ellis first, then made an encrypted call to Bud Goodrich, the special assistant responsible for the disposal of SWIFT SWORD. He told Goodrich that the letter had been delivered, gave a summary of Baines’s response, and said that the general was committed to the execution of SWIFT SWORD.
‘You can stand down,’ Goodrich said. ‘I’ll expect a report on my desk oh nine hundred tomorrow, but there’s no need to pad it.’
‘There’s something else,’ Stone said. ‘Dick Knightly is here. He was with Baines when I delivered the letter, and I believe he brought four modified helicopters to help the Free American cause.’
‘I know. Some gung-ho cattle baron fronted the papers.’
‘Do you know what he’s up to? Is he being watched?’
‘He’s showboating, making a political point about honouring promises. Don’t worry about it, Stone. It’s none of your business. Your work is done.’
‘Right,’ Stone said, although he knew that it wasn’t.
Albert Flynn was waiting on the porch of the farmhouse. Stone walked up to him and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’
Dick Knightly stood at the edge of a steep drop beyond the farmhouse, hands clasped at his back as he studied the army assembled in front of the Turing gates down in the valley. ‘I’m sorry to see you reduced to running errands for chair-warming bureaucrats like Bud Goodrich, ’ he said. ‘You deserve better.’
‘With respect, sir, that’s a cheap shot,’ Stone said.
‘It’s my honest opinion. I know you had a hard time of it on your last mission for Special Ops, and I don’t blame you for opting for a nice easy job in the DCI’s office, but frankly, son, you’d be better off in an insurance company. It’s the same kind of work, and at least you’d get a gold clock at the end of it. Speaking of retirement, I hope you’re not too attached to your new job. Stansfield Turner was a classmate of Carter’s at Annapolis, and Carter put him in office for just one reason: to cut us off at the knees. Word is, he’s going to open the Company’s cupboards and ransack the family jewels. Clandestine operations, black ops, executive orders - they’ll smear us with everything we had to do for the good of the Real and all the other Americas. And don’t think that your new position is going to save your lily-white ass from a reckoning for your past sins. If he thinks it expedient, Turner will throw you to the wolves without a second thought.’
‘Is that a warning, sir?’
‘It’s sound advice,’ Knightly said, and extracted a cigar and a silver penknife from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and sliced off the end of the cigar and plugged it into his mouth.
Down in the valley, one of the pair of giant Turing gates blinked on, its circular maw suddenly lit by the reflected light of the setting sun. The familiar deep hum of the gate filled the dark air and sharpened Stone’s anxiety, but he knew it would do no good to ask straight out about Tom Waverly. Knightly would come to that in his own sweet time, or not at all. So Stone stepped on his impatience and waited quietly while his old boss returned the penknife to his pocket and took out a Second Infantry Zippo lighter and snapped it open and bathed the end of the cigar in its flame. The little finger and ring finger of Knightly’s right hand were missing, lost to frostbite during the Battle of Moscow. Like many senior Company men, he was a veteran of the Russian Campaigns.
‘I must have seen hundreds of gates open,’ Knightly said, ‘but it still makes my blood race.’
‘I thought this wasn’t kicking off until twenty hundred.’
‘That’s when the main force goes through. But the gates have been opening and closing all day, retrieving scouts and sending in advance parties.’
A Jeep shot out of the blood-red mirror and swerved to a halt at the bottom of the ramp. On the other side of the gate, in an alternate version of America under Communist rule, an observer would have seen the same vehicle vanishing into a shining circle of light hung in thin air. A moment later, the mirror vanished like a burst soap bubble and the deep, ground-shaking hum faded away as technicians returned the Turing gate to its resting state.
‘The poor bastards,’ Knightly said. ‘They spent fifty years in exile, hoping all the while that the Communist government would somehow collapse so that they could return home. And then we appeared out of nowhere and told them that we were willing to give them the chance to take the fight directly to the Communists, that if things went wrong they could disappear back into our reality, regroup, and try again. Who could resist a deal like that? We were the answer to their prayers. So we brought them through the mirror, we armed and trained them, and we helped them gather intel and work up a credible Order of Battle. And then, just when they’re fired up and ready to go, we turn around and kick ’em square in the ass.’
He drew on his cigar, looking down at the army arrayed in the floodlit dusk.
‘Baines is an exceptional soldier, but this isn’t like George Washington and Valley Forge. He isn’t trying to evict an overextended colonial power. He’s going toe-to-toe with an entrenched government that exercises complete control over an entire nation. Even if he and his men manage to melt into the countryside and start up a guerrilla campaign, it isn’t likely anything’ll come of it.’
‘“If anything can happen in the multiverse, it will happen somewhere.” ’
‘No use quoting that at me, son. I may have invented that little
bon mot
to screw funding out of the Senate, but it doesn’t mean I believe it. Oh, I don’t deny it’s possible that SWIFT SWORD will split history into a hundred separate sheaves, and Baines may defeat the Commies in one or two of them. But mostly he won’t. The bad outcomes will outnumber the good outcomes. The sum of human happiness will be diminished.’ Knightly blew a plume of smoke into the cold dark air. ‘Did you follow the election?’
‘I know who won, sir.’
‘It was a true contest of thesis and antithesis. Davis is a visionary; Carter is an opportunist. Davis supports continued expansion, locating new Americas in need of aid and enlightenment, going to war to bring them the freedom they deserve, carrying the flame of freedom to every corner of the known multiverse. Carter wants an end to what he calls military adventurism, an end to exploration of anything but so-called wild sheaves. The difference is as clear as day and night, right and left, good and bad. Do you know who I supported?’
‘I don’t suppose it was Carter.’
‘The fact is, I think both of them are wrong. Carter is wrong about ending exploration, and Davis is wrong about using military force to expand our influence. War is a blunt tool, it’s costly, and if it goes badly there are huge political costs. In short, as Davis has so recently discovered, no democratic government can maintain a permanent war state. The sad thing is, it should never have come to this. We didn’t need to fight all those wars. I’ve always argued that the best way to topple a government is by covert action. With just a few good men applying force at exactly the right place, you can do anything. And if you fail, no one has to know about it. It’s how we started out, it’s what the Company does best, it’s what we should be doing right now. How about you, son? Do you still have fire in your belly? Are you still ready to lay down your life for your country?’
‘If I didn’t know better, sir, I’d think that you were trying to recruit me for some kind of covert op,’ Stone said.
Knightly looked straight at him, the same heavy-lidded stare that Stone had endured when he’d first reported for duty in the makeshift headquarters of the newly created Directorate of Special Operations, some fourteen years ago. Marsha Mason, the only woman in the first batch of Special Op field officers, had once said that it was like having your soul X-rayed.
‘You always were the smart one, Adam. Not the most intelligent of my little band of cowboy angels, not by any means, but the most savvy. As a matter of fact, I
do
need your help, but not for any operation, covert or otherwise. No, I want you to go to the assistance of your friend Tom Waverly. He went through the mirror about half an hour ago with one of the advance units . . . You don’t seem surprised.’
‘I talked to Tom before I came up here. I was pretty sure that he’d try something like this, so I asked perimeter security to keep an eye on him.’
‘Ah yes, your old friend Colonel Ellis.’ Knightly smiled around his cigar. ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it? What would you say if I gave you the chance to go after Tom and bring him back?’
‘Is that an order, sir?’
Stone was having a hard time hiding his relief. When Bruce Ellis had told him that Tom had gone through the mirror, he’d immediately decided to try to rescue him from the consequences of his stupid bravado, even if it meant chasing after him through the middle of a battlefield. He’d agreed to talk to Knightly only because he needed all the help he could get, and suspected that the Old Man wanted to save Tom for reasons of his own.
‘You don’t work for Special Ops anymore,’ Knightly said, ‘and neither do I, so how on God’s good green Earth could I give you an order? What I
am
giving you is a chance to save the life of the man who saved
your
life. You won’t be able to go through until after Wendell Baines has led his troops into battle, but as long as Tom sticks with that advance unit I know exactly where you can find him. You can take Albert with you - he’s a useful man in a tight spot - and I’ll make sure that at least one of the gates is kept open until you return. How about it? Are you game?’
General Baines’s speech to his troops was short and punchy. He quoted Shakespeare, the old chestnut about Saint Crispin’s day from
Henry V
. He made much of the fact that Gettysburg was just a few miles down the road, and told his troops that they were lighting a flame of freedom that would drive Communism’s evil works from their native land.
Stone watched the general’s performance on a monitor in an Airstream trailer that housed one of Bruce Ellis’s surveillance teams. Bruce was talking on a telephone in a cubbyhole at the far end, jammed between the chemical toilet and a kitchen nook where a pot of coffee simmered on a hot plate. Half a dozen technicians in roller chairs hunched over keyboards and CCTV monitors. One of them had shown Stone footage of the advance platoon passing through one of the Turing gates. Captain Gene Lewis had been driving the lead Jeep. The man in the shotgun seat next to him had been wearing a fleece-trimmed leather jacket and a baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Baines got a big cheer at the end of his speech. A bugler in a cavalry hat played the cavalry charge; several hundred engines revved up, spitting plumes of black smoke into the floodlit air. For a long moment, nothing else happened. Then the floodlights around the apron dimmed, the air filled with a low rumble that the turning axis of the world might make, and the mirrors of the two Turing gates flicked on, giving back the dazzle of the headlights of the vehicles facing them.
Bruce Ellis handed Stone a mug of coffee. ‘I guess you still take it black.’
‘Have you found out how long the gates will stay open?’
‘I still have a few people to call. Hang in there,’ Bruce said, and went back to his cubbyhole.
Stone sipped coffee and watched a rack of monitors that showed different views of two orderly lines of vehicles moving through the pair of gates. The coffee was pretty good, but it burned like acid in his jittery stomach and he couldn’t finish it. Two by two, vehicles moved toward the silvery mirrors of the gates and were swallowed by their reflections. Only a couple of dozen trucks were left when Bruce came back down the narrow corridor between the techs and racks of monitors and electronics.
‘I just got word that Knightly has been pulling strings back at Third Div headquarters. We’re supposed to shut down the gates as soon as the last of Baines’s men go through, but Knightly managed to get that changed. The gates will stay open for another three hours. Will that be long enough?’
‘I think so. If Tom isn’t where he’s supposed to be, I’m coming straight back.’
‘If you’re going into combat, you need to get kitted out,’ Bruce said. ‘Let’s start by losing that nice suit.’
Stone stripped to his underwear and pulled on a set of khaki coveralls and a flak vest with ceramic plates front and back. He borrowed a pair of combat boots from one of the technicians; Bruce gave him an olive-green parka with wolf-fur lining, a Kevlar-lined resin composite helmet, a Browning Hi-Power pistol, and a .22 pocket auto in an ankle holster.
‘As you once told me, always carry some kind of backup in Indian Territory,’ Bruce said. ‘It’s small, but it fires high-velocity hollowpoints with plenty of stopping power.’
‘Thanks, Bruce. I owe you big time.’
‘That parka’s a vintage item. If you get blood on it, don’t bother coming back.’
Stone carried a spare flak vest and helmet outside. Albert Flynn was leaning against the hood of the Jeep he’d requisitioned, smoking a cigarette. When Stone handed him the combat gear, he said, ‘You take the wheel, I’ll tell you exactly where to go.’
Stone said, ‘Do you have combat experience?’
‘Five years in the Marines. I can handle myself.’
‘What rank?’
‘Sergeant.’
‘Let me make it clear, Sergeant Flynn. I’m in charge. If you don’t like that you can stay here.’
‘I don’t like any of it,’ Flynn said. ‘But I have my orders, just like you.’
‘I’m not doing this because I was told to do it. I’m doing it because I want to help out an old friend.’